Reviews by OtisTDog

In its first moves, First Things First comes off as a kind of reverse "my apartment" game -- the protagonist has accidentally locked himself out of his house, and the spare key that he had hidden for just such an emergency isn't there. The modest beginning belies the scale of this work; structurally, it is something of a hybrid between Curses (Spoiler - click to show)(i.e. a quest in pursuit of a small and mundane goal that expands in scope and significance) and A Mind Forever Voyaging (Spoiler - click to show)(in which the action takes place across five time periods for the same location, each separated by a decade).

Per author J. Robinson Wheeler's description, this work, which was ambitious for its era, took about five years to develop. It was begun in 1996 and not released until 2001, then later improved in a 2006 re-release. As far as I can tell, the 2006 v3 re-release is the same as the original except for bug fixes.

As is to be expected in a game this old, gameplay is on the crueler side of the Zarfian scale, without apology. At first I thought it was truly "cruel," but the only verified dead-ends I encountered were of class "nasty," downgraded to at worst "tough" given the ability to >UNDO multiple times in a row. Certain occasions that I thought were dead-ends were not; many critical puzzles have multiple solutions, so it would have been possible to make progress despite appearances. Save games are a good idea due to the game's length if nothing else; although I did use them (or just plain >RESTART) to backtrack several times, I usually did so looking forward to the experience of trying something different.

There are also some significant flaws in terms of bugs and/or puzzle implementation. At least one bug allows a puzzle to be bypassed (Spoiler - click to show)(getting past a hostile dog by putting the things it's guarding onto something else without first picking them up), though there are multiple solutions for that trivial obstacle so gameplay is not really affected. Some of the information and feedback is inconsistent in a way that could be very frustrating, including (Spoiler - click to show)the necessity of putting something into something else that seems much too big to fit as described (Spoiler - click to show)(the cannonball in the drainpipe), the behavior of an oddly anthropomorphized squirrel (Spoiler - click to show)(it shows a very un-lifelike response to a book that is not typical of the game's style), inconsistency in awarding score on a puzzle that requires multiple cycles of an action so that it's not clear that progress is still being made (Spoiler - click to show)(while applying multiple doses of plant fertilizer), descriptions of thrown items that imply a very low likelihood of success for the action that turns out to be the required solution (Spoiler - click to show)(when throwing things at the small window), and a "secret" (i.e. unmarked) conversation keyword prompt at a critical point (Spoiler - click to show)(when confronted by the security guard and asked for a name) in which it is reasonable for the player to expect >SAY to work. These are the most significant of the issues that I encountered, but there are also numerous small errors of the type that are unlikely to be encountered and do not affect significantly gameplay if they are. (Spoiler - click to show)Examples: a disambiguation issue between a key and its copy, the functional presence of environmental features such as the sky in the basement of the office building in the farthest future time zone, incorrect scope resolution for the switch to a secret door such that it can be accessed from the wrong side, buggy implementation of "faceless" doors in the future office, etc.

Beyond definite flaws there are some questionable design choices, such as the fact that the map changes in small but annoying ways as the protagonist explores (Spoiler - click to show)multiple time zones -- many's the time that I entered a string of movement commands to get someplace only to find that it failed halfway. Additionally, there are several red herrings, which are fine as part of an old-school style but which irk a bit in a game with an inventory limit and doubly irk when they seem like they might work to address some of the problems encountered by the PC. Worst of all is something that strikes me as a straight-up dirty trick: (Spoiler - click to show)a locked door that has no key and can simply be unlocked by hand, but which is not described as having any kind of latch mechanism. (That's a terribly mean joke on the player at best, in the vein of +=3, but I have to admit that I laughed when I stumbled across the solution accidentally. Seriously, though -- don't do this.)

NPCs are present and fairly advanced for the era; they definitely present personalities, and two of them are major characters in the story. The ASK/TELL conversation implementation is limited by modern standards, with much of the effort of topic development having been put into certain key conversations that are required. One of the NPCs is designed to serve as the built-in hint system, though I didn't realize this when playing due to my limited interaction with him. Decompilation reveals pieces of an unfinished hint system using a >THINK or >HINT command or similar. This would have been a welcome feature, but the vast possibility space created by the premise seems like it would require a large effort to cover all of the possible variations -- possibly this is why it was abandoned.

Despite the above, there's a certain base cheeriness and sincerity to this game that makes it practically irresistible, plus a puzzle design sensibility that's often quite clever once past the prologue. I was well-motivated to overlook the various issues listed above. Although the game starts out with a goofy and trivial tone, it steadily -- almost imperceptibly -- becomes more serious as you progress. As tone and style shift, it begins to offer more philosophical beats. On top of that, the game keeps redefining the player experience as you progress in interesting ways, going from wacky "my apartment" antics to (Spoiler - click to show)intrepid time explorer adventure to potential romantic comedy to 80s corporate villainy, and then on to a dramatic climax that was definitely not what I was expecting. (Spoiler - click to show)The story's climax, which though memorable is one that offers little in terms of interactivity, reveals to the player that the player character is not the main character of this story.

There are other surprises, too -- places where the game lingers on states of affairs that would probably be culled in something other than a first work. The average author would be expected to trim this type of thing, because it's pure "waste" in terms of play time and programming effort... except it's not. Wynter's review notes an extended sequence in which the protagonist struggles to overcome an obstacle that seems like a legitimate avenue to reach a long-standing goal. It's not possible for the PC to succeed in this vignette, but while you're in it the game provides all of the signals that you're on the right track. Should you happen to encounter that scenario, once you've solved the puzzle you'll be left with a sense of wonder at the way that Wheeler went the extra mile to implement this sequence, part of an apparent commitment to supporting a broad range of potential trajectories through the game's possibility space in a manner that makes any one of them feel natural.

Really, "surprise" is the watchword of this work, and one of its best features. First Things First kept surprising me on the upside as I played it. It felt like the game covered a succession of stories -- almost like the old school "pastiche" approach to puzzle design was instead applied to the narrative. Since the frequent surprises were an essential part of the experience, I think the first time through it is likely to be the best time, and I strongly recommend approaching it with as little knowledge of the plot and puzzles as possible. Despite the possibility of getting stuck, I would also recommend avoiding hints from outside sources -- try the built-in ones by talking to (Spoiler - click to show)the proprietor of the sandwich shop instead, and don't forget to save the game every so often.

After finishing the game, my first thought was that -- over two decades since its original release -- it really cries out for a remake, or at least an update to clean up lingering bugs and sand off the remaining rough edges. Quite intriguingly, author J. Robinson Wheeler recently posted a screenshot suggesting the partial development of a sequel titled No Time to Lose. The serial number shown suggests that it was being developed in 2005, prior to the current release of First Things First, and it would be very interesting to see what Wheeler had in mind about the protagonist's future.

Time travel stories are something of a cottage industry in IF, but this is one of the best ones that I've played. If you enjoy that type of story and are prepared to approach this work with an old school mentality, you'll almost certainly enjoy First Things First. If those conditions don't apply, your mileage may vary, but I'd still encourage any would-be author to check this one out for its unique features -- it's definitely something different in terms of crafting style.

I have known about this game for a very long time, but I had always put off playing it because I understood it to be fairly difficult in terms of puzzles, and this impression was reinforced by a few sporadic attempts to get the ball rolling. That was something of a misunderstanding -- there's really only one puzzle, and though it is tricky it's not difficult in the sense of being hard to intuit what must be done; you have a definite objective from the start, and the scope of action is readily discerned.

All Things Devours is structurally composed of just that single puzzle; the provided story is the absolute minimum required to sketch out a motivation. I say that with admiration for the author's fine judgment of what that minimum was, because the game does a great job of providing just enough motivation to keep going even as the perceived scale of the puzzle's central problem keeps expanding in the face of early experimentation.

This game earns a lot of respect from me on a technical basis, especially for the elegant implementation of the core puzzle mechanic. (Side note: thank you to author half sick of shadows for releasing the source code!) However, the constraints of the puzzle feel somewhat artificial, and I'm not sure that I can put the label "fun" on a game that required putting together a spreadsheet to solve, even though I certainly did get satisfaction from the process.

One thing not mentioned in other reviews is the non-standard handling of the passage of time in this game. The author basically hotwired the Inform 6 Standard Library to be able to track time in five-second increments. As I recall, there are a few actions that require more than this span of time to accomplish; it would have been interesting to see this subsystem expanded to require variable lengths of time for different kinds of standard action, but that would have complicated both coding and gameplay in ways that would probably not be desirable. Although the overall impact is minor, one thing that is not minor is the effect on the player: Several reviewers note the way that the game instills a sense of urgency, and the extremely granular handling of the in-game clock does much to create and reinforce this feeling.

Another interesting sidebar is the code which handles duplicates of objects. These are not true duplicates in terms of dynamically created and destroyed memory allocations, but the subsystem is a remarkably clean way to handle the complexity introduced by allowing objects to be taken back in time. If you're interested in creating a strict time travel game with model of the process that presumes a single, unified and unalterable timeline, then you should definitely study how author Toby Ord handled the associated problems.

The game has been criticized for the fact that the story told by a successful playthrough depends on a superhuman level of foresight on the part of the player character, who finds that her original plan to sabotage her research won't work and must devise an alternate plan in a matter of minutes. I'm not sure how much that matters, since the real motivation for playing the game is the "because it's there" factor of it being a well-designed pure logic puzzle. I skipped the hard mode because it looked like the same type of exercise, only more so -- a little more story might have motivated me to try it.

If you like time travel stories, then this game will stand out as being one of the better "hard SF" implementations of the concept. I definitely recommend it for sci-fi fans and those who enjoy well-implemented puzzles that are well-grounded in the story. The technique used to implement the core restriction is also worth studying; it's a practically fool-proof method of handling paradox detection.

This game has possibly the most misleading title that I've ever encountered in a work of interactive fiction. Although the name suggests wordplay, there is nothing of the kind to be found within.

That's what it's not. What it is is harder to define. There are elements of mystery, heist, treasure hunt and survival horror, and in some places it seems to be looking longingly toward AIF. The game portion has a split focus between making it to the end alive and collecting valuable items along the way, and the story lies somewhere between political thriller and methodical heist. Gameplay is very constrained by the intended scene structure (i.e. "on rails"), which lends a choice-like feel to the work.

Most people discussing this game mention the interesting player character. She is a kind of alien, essentially humanoid but with such vast differences in culture that it can be hard to fully adopt her perspective. The PC is indeed the standout feature of this work, presenting an alien psychology that colors the whole playing experience.

The overall writing style tends toward the leaden and repetitive. In part this seems to be the consequence of a particular system of producing responses tailored to the current state of the PC's knowledge. The system is a solid concept from a technical sense, but it very much needed to be refined in its execution -- at many places it seemed to be malfunctioning in small ways. This game was written in Inform 6, and producing such a system under that language was a larger technical challenge than it would be today. Unfortunately, the author Richard Otter's reach seems to have substantially exceeded his grasp in this respect -- perhaps a collaboration with a more experienced programmer would have been desirable.

The game bills itself as science fiction, but it's a strange kind of science fiction that is difficult to go along with if one prefers the harder type. Some of the imaginary technology is nonsensical (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. a propulsion system based on biological cells), as are some of the engineering choices (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. an "airlock" that opens directly to space). These sorts of things were already straining my suspension of disbelief, and it was finally broken after the first glitchy encounter with an NPC.

This is a very distinctive work, however, and a standout effort at inventing aliens that are more than just "people with funny masks," and these features make it worth exploring if one is prepared to look past the flaws. A thorough debugging and second pass at the prose would do much to improve my estimation of this work, but as it is I can't give it more than two stars, meaning "there's something there, but it needs improvement".

The first time that I tried Six was many years ago, and, as I recall, at the time I kind of blinked at it a few times in bemusement, then put it aside. You're a little girl playing hide-and-go-seek? Seriously?

Even from my relatively brief encounter it was clear that the game was well-built and written in a manner that would be accessible to a young audience, so I would usually list Six when asked for recommendations for kids. As a result, Six is directly responsible for cementing a young lady of my acquaintance's interest in IF by virtue of being the first game that she finished without help (even though it took a while). (Spoiler - click to show)(She cited the puzzle where you have to use leaves to slow down the fastest kid as the one she was proudest of figuring out.) The game went up a bit in my estimation, but I still didn't know much about it myself.

I recently replayed it for the People's Champion Tournament, and this time I finished it, including the "new game plus" mode. With all the evidence in, my answer to my past self is: Yes! Seriously!

This is one of those pieces of IF that is just about fun. (Remember fun?) If you retain even the slightest remnant of your inner child, you will enjoy this game. The objective is straightforward enough, but there are enough obstacles to keep you engaged. The musical bits and the sound-based clues were also quite neat, and pretty rare for the era in which this game was developed. The colorful, cartoon-style pictures are only presented occasionally but do much to create the right mood.

The viewpoint presented is consistently that of the early grade-school player character(s): not very deep or reflective but instead gleeful and enthusiastic. My grown-up sensibilities were hoping for a slightly deeper implementation of the story in one place: (Spoiler - click to show)The protagonists meet a "mean girl" in the park who seems like the kind of person who -- in interactive fiction, if not so often in real life -- could become a friend with the right approach. It didn't seem to me like there is a way to make that happen, and, to be fair, as a kid I probably would have been fine with that. (And, as Sam Kabo Ashwell's review for the 2011 XYZZY Awards points out, this is thematically appropriate by way of reflecting the limited social framework of a kid as young as the PC.)

What moves this game out of just "good" and into "great" territory is the conscientious attention to making a smooth gameplay experience. This is appreciated by a grown-up player but essential to a newbie. I can't think of a bug or the slightest hint of guess-the-noun. I'm sure that I must have tried a few verbs that didn't work, but if so I don't recall them -- what I do remember is recapturing, if only briefly, the sense that a park is a place big enough to explore. (Spoiler - click to show)It wasn't until my second run-through that I even discovered the area where your birthday party is being set up. My hat is off to Wade Clarke for going the extra mile here: It really sells the existence of the protagonists' life beyond the events portrayed in the game. I think maybe you can get hints there, too, if needed. There's even a delightful crayon-drawn feelie map to ensure that you're never lost, and an instructional PDF for ultra-newbies who are afraid of the command prompt and/or unfamiliar with Australian vernacular. (One item not covered: "roundabout" means the same thing as "merry-go-round.")

I very much admire any game that's capable of attracting and holding the interest of new young players -- something that is strategically vital to creating a new generation of long-term players and authors -- and that's doubly the case for a work that's still enjoyable by adults. Definitely think of this one the next time you need a game for first graders, or as a light-hearted introduction to parser games for adults.

An older game submitted to the 2003 Spring Thing, Inevitable -- which is not to be confused with a 2017 work sharing the same name -- is a bit off the beaten path for the modern player, but it is an interesting stop on a tour of IF history.

The game offers adjustable difficulty, and I played it on the "harder" mode. This mode doesn't offer particularly hard puzzles as science fiction puzzlers tend to go, so unless you prefer games with few or no puzzles, I would recommend it.

The writing of the game starts out feeling a bit ponderous, but the player soon gets used to the serious tone. The player character is a military officer and space fighter pilot, whose planet recently lost an interstellar war. He or she is tasked with escorting an ambassador of the conquerors on what seems to be nothing more than a sightseeing tour of a now-abandoned city.

The opening sequence sets an interesting mood, with the protagonist's ship being damaged and unable to take off while a heavy storm rages outside. However, the rain abruptly stops and the mood just as suddenly shifts, leaving the player with the familiar task of scouring the empty city for what's needed to repair his ship. A glance at the horizon shows another squall line on the way, but (Spoiler - click to show)this is false foreshadowing that never ends up affecting the story.

As the player goes about this task, various interesting technical touches will be noted, which provide niceties that are relatively rare for the era. (This was the era immediately preceding the introduction of Inform 7, and the coding skill needed to achieve these in Inform 6 were decidedly above average.) The game offers a >GO TO functionality that isn't well-advertised but is a welcome affordance. A particularly nice touch was the way that the PC will considerately put everything aside before following your instruction to wade into water -- and then take it all back after emerging.

The overall style leans toward hard science fiction in that it's grounded in a realism informed by the characters fictional universe. The protagonist takes the futuristic items in inventory for granted, and much of the characterization comes in the form of timeless complaints about authority and regret over a woman from the past. At certain points the realism is inconsistent in its attention to detail, however -- for example, in a scene where (Spoiler - click to show) the protagonist must free-dive to obtain a long metal bar from an underwater structure some of the difficulties which might be expected in that situation (weight, awkwardness) are ignored. Also, there doesn't seem to be any function for certain items outside of demonstrating the nicety mentioned above, though arguably this is not wasted or unfocused work so much as a touch of hyper-realism for effect of the type I pointed to in my review of Anchorhead.

Certain significant parts of the interaction are definitely buggy, and other parts seem as though they might be. Only one issue rises to the severity of threatening the successful conclusion of the game (Spoiler - click to show)(a metal bar can become irreversibly stuck in a wall), but this is unlikely to be encountered in practice. The others that I noted (Spoiler - click to show)(a power tool magically performing its function while turned off, an item being described as being simultaneously on something and wedged into something, disambiguation messages for a particularly tricky sequence involving a complex shape) only create unexpected disruptions to the immersion. Said immersion is artfully achieved through vivid descriptions of the alien city environment and its varied technological artifacts; many reviewers compare it to the atmosphere of Myst.

The puzzle-solving is the core of the gameplay side of this work, and it was quite enjoyable. (Spoiler - click to show)Who doesn't like slowly reactivating derelict alien machinery? The game fulfills the promise of its hook and really shines here as the player makes progress through various obstacles. Only one puzzle seemed like a real problem to me, (Spoiler - click to show)a very important one involving a stone dolmen, but on review the issue seems to largely stem from an uncharacteristic shortfall in the description of the physical scene. In a complex spatial situation like that, I personally appreciate an abundance of information to make sure that the relevant details are communicated, and that style is followed assiduously everywhere else in the game. The worst case scenario is that you'll have to consult the walkthrough to get past that puzzle, which is hardly a catastrophe.

The two-star rating that I'm giving is based on the game's weaker side, which is its story. The narrative elements are interesting enough as their own framework, but they feel essentially grafted onto the gameplay framework -- they don't naturally interact and reinforce each other to improve the experience of both, which is the holy grail of interactive fiction. In addition to some very surprising revelations that seem like they should not have been withheld at the start (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. that the protagonist is in fact very familiar with the city, having lived there for years), I was left with significant questions about the plot, including but not limited to: (Spoiler - click to show)Why did the alien ambassador want to go there in the first place? Why did Rajan wait until the last second to intervene in the past? Why did the PC fixate on the woman with the green eyes in the past? That's not to say that the story was uninteresting -- it most certainly was not, and the flashback-oriented exposition is well-paced on a structural basis -- it's just that it seems like the story could have been quite different without affecting much of the experience of play.

The pacing near the end is irksome, slowed by some final puzzles when the narrative is trying to advance quickly. I personally found all of the available endings to be unsatisfactory from a narrative standpoint, leaving the emphasis in my memory on the setting, atmosphere and puzzles, all of which are very well executed. I did have fun with this game, and I expect that most sci-fi fans will, too, and absent the not-quite-insignificant bugs I would probably give it three stars.

In the glory days of the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup, from time to time someone (or a group of someones) would make a game as a demonstration of a rhetorical point. A famous example of this is +=3, which was written to demonstrate that an author needs to make the player aware of the relevant details of the game universe in order to be fair. As I understand it, this piece was also inspired by a discussion -- this time about possible models for the paid development of interactive fiction in the aftermath of the collapse of the commercial era. Given the scale of the effort, an echo of the Textfire collection of the previous year, it also seems to be inspired by the pure joy of practical jokery.

This is less a parody of the individual games involved than it is of our society as a whole -- specifically commercialism's influence on culture. The work posits that the manufacturer of Coca-Cola, infamous for never passing up a chance to expand the mindshare of its brand by slapping its logo on something new, has decided by spreadsheet that there's a theoretical payoff to funding new IF in order to achieve a little more brand awareness. It shows us a taste of a "what if" world in which some of the best-known works of the time were produced under a product placement model of monetary "support" for the art, a world in which presumably IF is plentiful... and it just won't shut up about the sponsor's carbonated beverage.

I suppose that whether this world is a utopia or dystopia is a matter of personal preference, but personally I'm pleased that, 25 years on, the art form has continued to grow organically in the absence of major commercial interests.

The rhetorical value of this work is lessened somewhat by the over-the-top nature of the jingoism, and as a game it suffers from a reliance on player knowledge of the games being simulated. David Welbourn's walkthrough can get you through any points where you become stuck, but there's no particular payoff to reaching the programmed end. It's still worth a quarter of an hour to be amused by the various one-liners and to consider the questions that the game implicitly prompts.

Aisle is one that I finally broke down and played a few years ago. It did not impress me, and I didn't find the central innovation (i.e. one-move game) to be very interesting as a mechanic. A recent re-examination of the work and its reviews in greater detail changed my opinion of it -- for the worse.

The game's tagline calls itself: "an instant in the life of a man" [emphasis mine]. Likewise, many reviews mention "the story" [again, emphasis mine]. But there is no single story. This is made clear by the "frontispiece" displayed upon opening Aisle, which at its end states: "Be warned; there are many stories and not all of the stories are about the same man."

As many reviewers note, extended interaction bears this out. It's not possible for the PC to be just one man due to conflicting information presented in various "endings." (I put scare quotes around the term because it seems clear that no one outcome is intended to represent a complete experience, thus the interactor is almost certain to "replay" many times before deciding to stop.)

Obviously, on a purely structural basis, the interactor of this work is expected to try at least dozens of different moves in order to observe the various bits of past and/or future that each new "ending" produces. Theoretically, that structure does offer an interesting possibility, in that the motivated interactor can try to suss out particular details and build up a picture of the whole possibility space of the protagonist's future as well as the complex of factors in his past that shape his present. To my mind, the kind of meaningful question asked and answered by a work of this structure should be: How can one action now change the future of this person, and what are the limits of that change? (As Duncan Stevens puts it, the point would be "to explore the central character and take a look at the various possibilities available to him from one point in time.")

Unfortunately, since this work is not consistent in the details that a diligent player uncovers, any meaningful exploration of those questions is abandoned, and the whole concept reduces to an exercise in style. Sean Barrett's I'll does a good job of making the point in an exaggerated manner via rhetoric-in-action.

The central premise of the scenario is weak and seems particularly ill-suited to a weighty treatment of the possibilities opened up by the novel mechanic. (As the review by Ben at Trotting Krips notes: "It is difficult to turn your life around in the middle of a Winn-Dixie.") The inciting incident is that the protagonist has a moment over the fresh gnocchi at the end of an unpleasant day. Prior to this, he seems to be just have been going aisle by aisle through this, his regular grocery store, in a run-of-the-mill bit of shopping. Is this the first time the store has stocked fresh gnocchi? Has he never noticed this item before? Has he forgotten that it was there? Why does *this* time seem so significant? The work offers no answers -- does not seem to have anticipated the question.

... Or maybe it has. Perhaps the added significant context is the proximity of the brunette, whose appearance reminds the PC of a woman, Clare, who features so prominently in many responses.

The work is noted for its 100+ unique "endings," but the range of supported actions is not well-correlated to the situation, making it hard to predict the effect of many commands. For example, if >SLEEP is tried by the player, it is because he or she is in "lawnmowering" mode and that is a default verb, not because it makes any sense for the PC to actually go to sleep. At least some responses use unique verbs that are unlikely to be discovered without a walkthrough or decompilation. It's hard to know what to make of responses to commands such as >GIBBER or >DROOL, which are highly unlikely to be tried without external prompting.

Interactions with the woman tend to send the "story" on an unexpectedly dark trajectory. Stevens notes that the PC "often treats apparently normal conversational gambits as an excuse to act psychotic." While I immediately agreed with this sentiment, that description is, on balance, overstated. The author usually chooses an unpleasantly surprising spin on the interactor's choice of actions involving her, even those that seem innocuous, in a manner that strikes me as a deliberate exploitation of the coarse-grained interaction afforded by the ASK/TELL model, which collapses many potential variations of topics into one keyword or keyphrase response. Since the woman is by far the most interesting part of the environment the player is certain to stumble over one of these warning signs soon enough, perhaps in response to >ASK WOMAN ABOUT PASTA or >ASK HER ABOUT HER CART. Sure, asking someone about the contents of their cart at the grocery store is an unconventional conversation starter, but does Barlow think that the PC's subsequent actions truly represent the player's intent? Compare those two responses to >ASK HER ABOUT HERSELF or >ASK HER ABOUT GNOCCHI for similarly unpredictable results in what is presumably intended to be a positive direction.

Inevitably, the interactor reaches a point in exploration where, to quote Stevens again, "options for civilized behavior run out." If one stops before that point (and has by happenstance missed the yellow flags presented when interacting with the woman), then it is indeed possible to come away with a sense that this is a single story dominated by themes of "romantic isolation" and "melancholic longing" as labeled by Jimmy Maher's review, or even one that is "beautiful and tragic" as described by manonamora's. However, the work itself does not stop there, and a completionist will soon discover huge swathes of additional "story" that are very dark indeed, with possibilities ranging as far as assaulting the woman in the store or the revelation that the PC is a murderer. When one bears these darker outcomes in mind, it becomes more difficult to interpret the "positive" outcomes as good things, after all. (In fact, on closer inspection, even some of the presumably-positive outcomes involving the woman seem tinged with a sense of predatory manipulation.) As one progresses through less and less likely significant responses, the PC becomes steadily more repugnant.

Between the single-response constraint and the author's capricious imputation of the intent behind any given command, I'm hard pressed to say what it is the player is supposed to be actually doing after loading up Aisle. When interacting with this work the interactor is not actually exploring a character or a story -- between the limited and/or contradictory information about the context of the single choice point for the protagonist and the extremely low ability to predict the impact of that choice on the situation, this work is missing the heart of what I consider interactive fiction to be. There is nothing solid to discover through persistence, and although any one response often resonates to a greater or lesser degree with others, it is difficult for the player to even draw firm boundaries between the various major permutations of the "true" situation, as these seem to bleed into each other in places. In the end, we are only exploring the author's momentary whimsies until patience and/or interest runs out.

As noted in the review of Mike Root, there is an alternative lens for evaluation of Aisle, which is that the work's purpose is to "play the player." The best evidence for this interpretation is the way that certain clusters of responses do paint a semi-consistent portrait of a certain type of person with a certain type of past. However, these responses do not seem consistent enough to look like deliberate planning on the author's part. For example, if the player focuses on mundane goals, the commands >EXAMINE GNOCCHI, >EXAMINE PASTA, >TAKE PASTA, >TAKE GNOCCHI, >TAKE SAUCE, >ASK WOMAN FOR SAUCE, and >PUSH CART are all straightforward options, but they each define significant aspects of the PC and/or his backstory in a manner that the player can't possibly predict. For example, >PUSH CART imputes an active anger to the PC over being confronted with the suppressed memory of Rome and edges slightly malevolent toward the brunette, while >TAKE GNOCCHI suggests long-settled resignation about the outcome of the events of Rome and ignores the fellow shopper. >TAKE SAUCE yields a Clare-less response implying that Rome wasn't that significant, after all, and >ASK WOMAN FOR SAUCE indirectly suggests a painful episode from which the protagonist might be starting to recover (or perhaps, taking some responses into account, something less pleasant). Although the outcomes differ significantly, I don't see any consistent logic mapping those significant differences in outcome to significant differences in the player's choice.

In summary I would say that Aisle does best when engaged with on a very shallow basis -- one can argue whether or not that necessarily means that the work itself is shallow. I think I would have liked it better with fewer implemented responses, and especially if Barlow had chosen to trim out or simply not respond to various default verbs related to violence, as it does for some of the stock actions in Inform 6's Standard Library. In that form it might live up to the praise in Jimmy Maher's review, even as it was reduced in scale to a bite-sized 15-minute novelty. I would definitely have liked it better if all endings were consistent with one another such that discerning the protagonist's total past becomes a genuine exercise in discovery, which would let the diligent player reach the point of making an informed and more importantly intentionally significant choice of the single allowed action.

One of the reasons that I don't often play choice games is that it rarely feels like the choices available are about directly controlling the character that you're playing. The options often clearly have significance in terms of impact on the unwinding plot, but it can feel more like the old CYOA books than interactive fiction.

You're a Time Agent! neatly avoids that by having the choices matter on an almost second-to-second basis. As a "time agent" of unspecified provenance, you are tasked with infiltrating a facility of unspecified importance. Your obstacle is a door guard, and the puzzle is essentially one of social engineering aided by the supernatural ability to retain information from alternate futures.

Author Tabitha O'Connell overtly undermines the "hey, wow - time powers!" aspect of the game with an introduction which promises that gameplay will consist of "f*cking around" in time. Still, even though the scenario doesn't have much scale, it's surprisingly compelling. As the player-stand-in protagonist tries various gambits, minute bits of information will be pried loose from the stony-faced guard, and these begin to create new options to try.

As manonamora notes, the choice links are conveniently color-coded to indicate when they have been "played out." This is a wonderful nod to the player experience that heads off the most likely source of frustration for the format of the gameplay. Various branches of the timeline offer silly "achievements" that are tallied and listed once success has been achieved.

What's most fascinating to me about this work is the way that it manages to turn the scenario into a fairly mundane experience that feels like "just another day at the office" for the titular time agent. That's not criticism -- that's praise for the author's skill; it would be very easy to make this premise either too silly or too boring to recommend, but instead it's a bite-sized mini-adventure that engages without resorting to the most typical styles of glamor. As one repeatedly rewinds to try again, the guard, initially presented a stock villain, begins to soften and become a person as various peeks behind the professional mask are obtained. (Spoiler - click to show)In one branch he even gives you $50 for dry cleaning, motivated by sympathy for a stranger on the street. He, too, is having just another day at the office.

I've only gotten one ending (so far!), but I'd definitely recommend this "amuse-cerveau" as an enjoyable short experience.

Emily Short's masterpiece is widely considered to be the Greatest Work of IF of All Time. This is reflected in its very secure #1 spot in the IFDB Top 100 list and its continual appearance among the topmost slots of every quadrennial Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time since its release (having placed 3rd in the 2015 edition and 1st in the following 2019 and 2023 editions).

It is undeniably fun to play with the semiotic manipulation technology (one of those advanced technologies that are indistinguishable from magic), and the inventive exercise of the various combinations of changes in the puzzle design makes for a "just right" feel of challenge almost universally throughout the game. The task for the player is constrained enough that finding a solution is almost inevitable, but unique enough to make each solution feel like a surprising breakthrough intuition. I once saw someone describe the essence of good puzzle design as "making the player feel smart," and it's hard to imagine a better recipe for doing so using "reasonably easy but not boring" puzzles.

In addition to sporting very enjoyable puzzles, Counterfeit Monkey's narrative earns consideration as literature by exploring questions that seem even more relevant today than they were when it was released. Its indirect commentary on the nature of language and its interaction with reality, and especially how that interaction is relevant to politics, is the work's thought-provoking philosophical core.

Short's tremendous worldbuilding skills are put to the test by this work's scope, but, as Edward Lacey's early review points out, she does a remarkable job of inventing a plausible-feeling world in which this technology exists but which is somehow not too different from our own. The pacing of the complex exposition is slow enough that significant questions will linger in the player's mind for some time, but by the end of the game those questions will have been answered.

Viewed through the lens of conventional storytelling, the resolution of the narrative comes off as strangely incomplete; the three most significant characters (Spoiler - click to show)(Andra, Alex and Brock) all seem unexpectedly subdued about the radical rearrangement of their relationships with respect to each other -- my impression on completing the game was that they are in shock at the story's conclusion, not yet ready to acknowledge the scale of the inevitable changes to their respective status quos. The outcome of the greater political situation also seems a bit too pat, in that (Spoiler - click to show)the new Atlantida seems too insubstantial to hang any hope upon; surely there were other people involved in the government with a vested interest in the way things were and who will look to "reset" the embodied spirit of the country in their own image posthaste. Still, the dramatic questions of the ostensible plot have been resolved (Spoiler - click to show)(if in a manner that looks like failure to the player), so perhaps the remaining questions are springboards for their own stories. (... and note that, for anyone brave enough to try, the game was published under a CC-BY-SA license, so the way is open.)

Short did consciously make the moral climax of the player character's story into a "no-win situation," citing it as "an illustration of one of the core problems of democratic society," and (per the same source) was clearly aware that she was leaving the items outlined in the previous paragraph unresolved. As such, we can be fairly certain that Counterfeit Monkey is telling exactly the story that she wanted to tell, in exactly the way that she wanted to tell it.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about why this work left me a little disappointed. At first I thought that it was just the familiar result of exploring a work that is surrounded by hype and finding that it didn't live up to my expectations, but I later realized that that's not the case here. It actually exceeded my expectations as a game -- it is such a high level of craft that it pegs the needle of my ability to discern things to appreciate; doubtless there is much genius embedded in this work's coding and storytelling technique that escapes my notice entirely by virtue of being off the scale. What I can see is that this work perfects many of the signature elements of Short's style (e.g. conversations, creating a "living" setting, thematic puzzle design) and is truly a masterwork in terms of game design.

What disappoints me is the story side, and the reason is that I was convinced for structural reasons that a different story was being told.

(Spoiler - click to show)
The story that is actually being told is about the intersecting character arcs of Andra and Alex. The situation is such that each perceives a zero-sum game, but in actuality there is a wider range of possible outcomes including negative-sum (as is actually observed in the ending) and possibly positive-sum (as is hinted but not realizable). Each character acts in accordance with his or her own values and priorities, and certain choices -- including the functional climax choice of whom to release from storage -- are between mutually exclusive options that can satisfy only one of the two.

The structure of the work makes me believe that Short was trying to create a genuine tragedy, i.e. a story in which the "right" choices from the perspectives of the characters in the story results in a "wrong" outcome from the perspective of the audience. The key evidence here is that the player must make the climax choice without being able to anticipate the resulting consequences. I scratched my head for a long time about this design element, because as a player of even the most interactive of fiction I feel more like a member of the audience than a genuine actor in the story -- an almost inescapable side-effect of the fact the available actions are always constrained by the finite nature of the embodying program. The design around the story climax did not seem consistent with Short's normal style, but it makes sense as a deliberate choice if the intent was to simulate being the character in a tragedy, i.e. not knowing what the audience knows.

In fact, the "audience" does know the most important and impactful fact affecting the personal drama between Andra and Alex, which is that there is a time limit of unknown length after which their temporary fusion will become permanent. It is clear that neither Andra nor Alex want this outcome, but the game makes it easy to forget this and to ignore that ticking clock in favor of having fun in the moment. (Who doesn't delight in discovering the untalented naval polecat?) Upon reaching the ending, I, too, was in shock alongside the main characters. Like many, I tried different ways to reach the winning state that I assumed must exist, only to later discover that it simply is not provided.

This story doesn't feel like a tragedy to me, it feels only like a bummer ending to an otherwise extremely fun game. (Tellingly, most of Counterfeit Monkey's effusive reviews tend to ignore the endings entirely.) I credit an excellent essay by Drew Cook for elucidating various aspects of tragedies that are essential but which are not provided here. The key quote from the essay sums it up: "Through tragedy, capricious disaster becomes comprehensible and–rather optimistically–a step on a path toward social harmony and cohesion." Among the available endings for Counterfeit Monkey, I felt only the capricious disaster; there seems to be nothing to learn.

Maybe that's not actually true. Maybe the deep message is that we are supposed to keenly observe how the limited perspectives of Andra and Alex make them focus on their short-term conflicts about items of lesser importance to their what-should-be-evitable mutual detriment. The fact that Short ultimately let the structural requirements of a tragic story outweigh the structural requirements of a fun game shows what her priorities were as the author, and this aspect of the work as a whole is good evidence that she was trying to craft something more than "just a game," i.e. entertainment alone.

Until near the end, the story that I felt sure was being told was one about a society whose authority figures have grown unresponsive to its citizenry, and which is on the verge of rediscovering what "democracy" really means. A society in which the power to manipulate symbols is equivalent to the ability to manipulate reality itself. A society whose increasingly authoritarian government knows that its ability to define the symbols is the basis of its control over the populace. Given the background of discontent and the "showdown" scene between a crowd of protesters and a policeman -- a scene so perfectly placed as the climax of an Act II, the resolution of which raises the dramatic tension of the societal conflict that has constantly threatened to break into the foreground -- given that setup, I fully expected the actual climax of the story to be one in which the masses descend on the Bureau's headquarters, interrupting the protagonists' escape plot but allowing the player to use the knowledge gained earlier to tip the balance one way or the other... perhaps at the willfully-paid cost of giving up the chance to reverse the corporal fusion.

As it is, the showdown scene is not foreshadowing, it's just a wonderful study in miniature of the highest potential of IF: a point at which everything that the player has experienced so far begins to resonate with a thrilling emotional and cognitive power so rarely reached in the form. (I personally haven't been so enthralled since "The Puzzle" of Spider and Web.)


Is this Short's best work? As a game, yes, undoubtedly. Counterfeit Monkey is a brilliant resolution of the archetypal conflict between narrative and crossword through skillful synthesis into something more than the sum of its parts -- with a clever meta-wordplay twist, to boot.

As art, though, I'm not so sure, and since it's not just a game, I can't rate it on that basis alone -- I have to take into account the story side at least as much.

My playing group spent a good month talking about this work, debating about the core message(s) it presents. One member was almost 100% on the author's wavelength and laid out an analysis that turned out to be very well supported by Short's own self-commentary when we got to the point of doing research instead of just comparing perceptions. Thus, it seems likely that the narrative part is a complete artistic success for a substantial portion of the audience.

Perhaps the shortfall that I perceive only seems important because the game part is so masterfully done that it comes off (very deceptively) as having been effortless to produce. As other reviewers note, it is an amazing gift to the public for Short to have released this work, her magnum opus, for free, and I don't want to be unappreciative here -- I had a lot of fun playing it, and you will, too. I just can't help but think that there was a missed opportunity to discuss larger aspects of society, aspects that I would have loved to see Short's particular genius explore in more detail -- indeed, aspects that were clearly part of her thought process while creating this work! -- and that doing so would have raised the artistic value of the result considerably. My gut instinct is that this could have been enduring literature of a quality comparable to Ursula K. LeGuin's best if themes about language and its impact on society had been the primary focus instead of just a prominent element. Even though Counterfeit Monkey as a game is an as-yet-incomparable synthesis of narrative and crossword puzzle, it seems to me that there are still greater heights to be reached by interactive fiction -- heights that, if they are ever attained, will be so in part because Emily Short with this work pointed the way.

My natural inclination is to go with 4 stars in acknowledgement of what Counterfeit Monkey might have been, but by the standards of my published rubric there is no doubt that, as a work which is "so incredible it effectively defines the genre or technique that it introduces or perfects," 5 stars are deserved for being the pinnacle of the wordplay puzzler. Kudos to Ms. Short, and thank you.

This is a pretty solidly-implemented short scenario using Inform 6 with the PunyInform library. It has 4500 lines of well-organized source code, which is available for download, and which demonstrates some advanced techniques such as use of a third noun. The PunyInform library has evolved significantly since the version used here (which is 2.4), however, so be advised that some changes may be necessary if adapting the code for your own use.

The review by MathBrush highlights the finicky nature of some parts of the interaction, which significantly detracts from the player experience. In addition to the strict requirements for phrasing, there are certain places in which the game provides feedback that teaches the player the wrong thing. Later in the game, this can be a problem where, as Mark Twain might put it, what interferes with your progress is not what you don't know but what you know that "just ain't so."

A couple of examples of this spring to mind. First, in the opening room: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a mouse hole. The protagonist, though expected to risk the anger of bloodthirsty pirates in the course of reaching the best ending, is too afraid to >SEARCH or >REACH INTO this hole. The >EXAMINE text for the hole implies that it's too dark to see into, but if a lit lamp is available, then a fresh >EXAMINE will discover something inside the hole. However, the >SEARCH and >REACH INTO commands don't change their behavior in response to light, and this seems a bit cruel, especially in the case of >SEARCH (which implicitly involves examining). Second, on the pirate ship: (Spoiler - click to show)While it is strongly hinted that the PC must create a diversion, it's up to the player to figure out how to do this. The correct solution, which involves (Spoiler - click to show)>BURN PILE OF STRAW after relocating it, might be fine if it weren't for a similar object (in the first room) which can't be moved. It's a case where the player being attentive to the game's feedback works against the player's understanding of the game world -- personally, I would think that the first room object was the more portable of the two in the absence of more information. More importantly, there is an opportunity to (Spoiler - click to show)>CUT ROPES which would seem more than satisfactory to create a diversion and would make use of an available inventory item, but for which no response is programmed.

I know that author Garry Francis is a champion of the old school style, and I still regard this game favorably in general, but its design ignores decades of genuine advances in puzzle craft and interaction technique. What essentials would have been lost by a "merciful" design (per the Zarfian scale) for the warehouse sequence, or by having the NPCs be a little less obviously keyword automatons? (Spoiler - click to show)(Harold never even gets up off the floor of the bar even while answering the PC's questions at length, and shows less life than Samuel, who believably passes out after drinking too much of the rum the PC gives him.) Why the occasional attention to admirably small details such as non-essential pieces of the pirate ship, and the presence of some descriptions of smells and sounds, but only about a dozen conversation topics per NPC? (Spoiler - click to show)(On review of the source code, the most talkative NPC -- in terms of available responses -- on land turns out to be Jerome, instead of Harold or Isaac, which surprised me because he seems the least important of the three.)

I'm going with 2 stars on this one because I think Captain Cutter's Treasure has potential that it hasn't quite reached. It really wouldn't have taken much to cross the threshold into 3-star (i.e. "good") territory, some of the items mentioned above would go a long way, and even doubling the topic count (about a dozen responses each) for NPCs and doing other things to add a touch of realism would make the protagonist's situation more convincing.